This is real.
I came back home for a few weeks, to heal my body and my mind.
I had been living in the jungle for a year, working to have an impact on the world.
I learned the hard way that the troubles you try to leave behind when you go “change the world”, they catch up to you, no matter how noble the cause.
So I went from the Panamanian rainforest at dawn to the busiest street of Montreal at dusk. From one jungle to another. In an attempt to get my shit together during our two-week break.
Only a few hours in Canada, I had swallowed a donut, the airport had lost my luggage and an accident on the highway tainted my drive home.
By morning I had sunk into my comfortable habits. The ones I find meaningless and depressing but safe and unavoidable. The desires I hate having. The imaginary needs. The things I judge myself for. My middle class routine, my urban problems. What other people are wearing and my discomfort with the homeless.
I realized all the things I had missed during my year by the river.
I missed buying a coffee even if I didn’t feel like drinking coffee.
I missed driving a car. I missed music.
I missed clean towels and my dirty dishes.
I missed the pretty things and dressing up.
I missed the laundromat and the skateboards.
I missed being a stranger in a sea of strangers.
I missed the sound of the old man’s TV set a few doors down.
I missed buying a bagel in my pj’s on Mont-Royal.
I missed hearing sirens somewhere reminding me that there is a world outside the space behind my eyes.
I missed riding a bike.
I missed charging my phone while it rained outside.
I missed small talk with the waiter in a language I can understand.
I missed poutine. At 4am. Just because I can.
A friend from the jungle told me : “That isn’t real. This is real.”
By ‘that’ he meant the things I missed. The city life. The rat race. Those weren’t real.
By ‘this’ he meant 150 people living in the jungle. He meant the struggle is real. Pushing your boundaries, planting trees. Living everyday in a very physical way. Being aware of your surroundings, your rotting feet, the scolding sun. That was real.
He was right in a way.
The life I live in a city, as much as I love going to yoga and buying croissants, is one that is lived entirely in my head. In that space in my mind, where I forget to look up and feel the air in my nose.
A life where what seems important really isn’t.
A life of Tinder and parallel parking.
But killing a chicken and eating it in your evening stew… Now that’s real.
Unfortunately, even the most engaging realities get taken over by our incessant minds. After a while, even the most meaningful routine becomes meaningless and taken for granted.
Even in this very real place, this wild and unforgiving jungle, I get jealous, I get insecure, I get FOMO.
I struggle expressing my needs in relationships.
I wonder what I want to wear in the morning.
My head is flooded with irrelevant thoughts in the shower instead of focusing on the sunset shinning through the wood panels or paying attention to the snake five feet away.
If ‘real’ is based on outside cicumstances such as what you are doing and where you are doing it, then yes, living directly in nature trying to build an alternative way of life is hella real.
But no matter how purposefull the cause, it will always be altered with thoughts and fears, with the inner world that you carry wherever you are.
My fear of not being good enough remains, whether I’m saving people from misery or trying to paint some colours on a piece of canvas.
Real is when you deal with your inner world. No matter where you are.
In a tent in the jungle, in a tiny apartment of a bustling city or in an ashram in India.
Real isn’t what you are doing and where you are doing it.
Real is knowing who you are.
Listening to yourself, to your needs.
It’s seeing your limitations and your defence mechanisms.
Real is feeling your breathe in your belly and eating what your body needs.
Real is understanding why you are angry and knowing how to say sorry.
I’ve come to realize that I keep waiting to get to the next best place, the one that is truly real.
But while I work to get to those places and as it turns out even when I’ve made it there, I’m not fulfilled because it isn’t the place that makes things real, it’s who I am while I’m there.
It’s about your inner life and the way you engage with the outside world.
Being real with yourself. That’s real.
Behind your desk. At the grocery store. In your hammock.
Dealing with your shit is the only way to wake up to reality and be satisfied in every situation. Whether in a rainforest with 150 change-makers, or working at the coffee shop around the corner.
And if that means not being where the struggle is real, not pushing your boundaries to change the world, but rather doing breathing exercises and reading books because that’s what you need, then that’s the only thing that will ever be real.
